Opium poppies, the source of illicit heroin, are also important for producing medical painkillers such as morphine and codeine, along with noscapine, which has been used for decades as a cough suppressant. More recently, researchers have found noscapine is also a potent anti-cancer agent, prompting clinical tests into its role in fighting blood cancer. The discovery that a cluster of 10 genes is responsible for the synthesis of noscapine inside the poppies means plant breeders can now develop high-yielding varieties. It may also help scientists in future produce the drug in factories.

Rosemond is perhaps more notorious in the hip-hop community for his alleged involvement — which he has consistently denied — in the bicoastal feud that led to the murders of rappers Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace, known as Biggie Smalls. He served as the CEO of Czar Entertainment which managed big-name artists including the Game, 50 Cent, Akon, Brandy and boxer Mike Tyson. Prosecutors accused Rosemond of operating a cross-country cocaine ring that shipped the drug to New York and sent the money to the West Coast

A subject under the influence of bath salts poses a similar problem as PCP (a.k.a. angel dust) did in its 1980s heyday—a problem not easily solved with the tools officers have on hand. Less-lethal tools such as pepper spray or a baton are nearly useless, doctors said. “Talking rarely calms the situation and the use of blunt force may not slow them down,” said Sydney Vail, a trauma doctor and director of the Arizona DPS SWAT team. “O.C. spray may likely be ineffective as well.” Home or street chemists create bath salts usually using at least one of three chemicals now banned by the Drug Enforcement Administration—MDPV, mephedrone, and methylone. The potent mixture, which is sold on the Internet and in head shops, has the hallucinatory effect of LSD and stimulates users like amphetamine, said Dr. Jeffrey Ho, an ER physician and Meeker County (Minn.) Sheriff’s Office reserve deputy.

The 49-year-old Beaverton divorcee was impressed when she met a 69-year-old Southeast Portland man on the Internet dating website eHarmony. He seemed well-educated, charming and kind. They had a lot in common, including that she was a dental hygienist and he was a retired dentist. On the fourth date — an evening that included hors d’oeuvres, wine and a few puffs of pot — the two had sex. The woman was looking for a husband. Instead, she ended up with genital herpes. After enduring repeated painful outbreaks of the disease and spiraling into clinical depression, she filed a lawsuit. Last week after a four-day trial, a Multnomah County jury awarded her nearly every dollar she was asking for: $900,000 for her pain and suffering. It was the first time a case of one person suing another for intentionally transmitting herpes went to trial in Oregon, said the attorneys who tried and researched the case.

According to investigators, the boy was with his family in front of the United Airlines ticket counter when Mellen walked up to the family and struck the boy in the forehead with a closed fist. “He just walked along, and out the blue hit the kid straight in the head,” said Wayne Clark, director of aviation security at JIA. “No apparent reason why he would do this.” Clark said Mellen hit the boy so hard that the boy fell to the ground and his head bounced on the surface. “The kid fell rather violently on the floor,” Clark said. Ellen Lehnert was traveling that day and witnessed the punch. “We were real baffled about why,” Lehnert, who’s from Illinois, said in a phone interview. “I felt really, really bad for the child. The mother had told me that the child didn’t know where he was after that, so my guess is the kid hit the child hard enough he might have given him a concussion or something.” Thanks Jasmine

Create a Do Not Kill List The New York Times reports that President Obama has created an official “kill list” that he uses to personally order the assassination of American citizens. Considering that the government already has a “Do Not Call” list and a “No Fly” list, we hereby request that the White House create a “Do Not Kill” list in which American citizens can sign up to avoid being put on the president’s “kill list” and therefore avoid being executed without indictment, judge, jury, trial or due process of law.

More than 30 million Chinese people live in caves, many of them in Shaanxi province where the Loess plateau, with its distinctive cliffs of yellow, porous soil, makes digging easy and cave dwelling a reasonable option. Each of the province’s caves, yaodong, in Chinese, typically has a long vaulted room dug into the side of a mountain with a semicircular entrance covered with rice paper or colorful quilts. People hang decorations on the walls, often a portrait of Mao Tse-tung or a photograph of a movie star torn out of a glossy magazine. The better caves protrude from the mountain and are reinforced with brick masonry. Some are connected laterally so a family can have several chambers. Electricity and even running water can be brought in. “Most aren’t so fancy, but I’ve seen some really beautiful caves: high ceilings and spacious with a nice yard out front where you can exercise and sit in the sun,” said Ren, who works as a driver and is the son of a wheat and millet farmer.

THE CITY took an unusual step this month on its long-running battle against graffiti by shutting down an upper Manhattan hardware store that sold spray paint to minors, officials said. Cops zeroed in on Apartment Depot Hardware on Broadway near W. 142nd St. in Hamilton Heights after several people busted for tagging in the neighborhood said they bought their paint from the store, cops said Friday. “We just went for the source,” a police source said. The shop, run by Jose Tejada, 42, was shuttered May 4 for six days after it allegedly sold spray paint to 18-year-old auxiliary officers posing as regular teens three times between May and November last year, court papers show. City law prohibits selling spray paint to anyone under the age of 21. Because there were three incidents, the city was able to shut the store under its nuisance-abatement law, which is typically used to shutter spots suspected in drug dealing, gambling or prostitution.

Like many other animal lovers, Dutch artist Bart Jansen found it hard to part with his pet cat, Orville, after he was hit by a car. So he decided to turn the dead feline into a unique piece of artwork called the Orvillecopter. Jansen named his beloved pet after the famous aviator Orville Wright, so I guess it makes perfect sense that he decided to turn the cat into a remote-controlled helicopter. After having the Orville stuffed by a taxidermist, the artist teamed up with radio-controlled helicopter expert Arjen Beltman to make the cat fly for the first time. Beltman designed a custom mechanism and attached it to the stuffed cat to create a truly bizarre flying machine called the Orvillecopter. Bart Jansen unveiled his unique creation on Saturday, at the Kunstrai art festival in Amsterdam, and described it as half cat, half machine.

Lithuanian photographer Tadas Cerniauskas photographed models as they were being blasted in the face by a high-powered jet of air from an industrial leaf blower. His models clearly weren’t put off by the old schoolyard saying: “If the wind changes your face will stay that way”.

Renovation of a landmark Los Angeles restaurant has revealed a neon lamp that has been left on for around 77 years. The light, forgotten for decades, was discovered burning brightly behind a dusty wall in the woman’s restroom in Clifton’s Cafeteria. The surprising discovery was made as the building’s owner, Andrew Meieran, as he undertakes a multimillion renovation of the historic building.

▲ OSU veterinary graduate pleads guilty to sodomy

In a consent agreement with the Pennsylvania Department of State, Wilson admitted to engaging in sexual misconduct with a small female horse for six minutes on the evening of Sept. 14, 2009. In lieu of further disciplinary action, Wilson also agreed to refrain from practicing veterinary medicine in Pennsylvania for a minimum of five years, the agreement says.

Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone has urged the U.S. Department of Defense in a recent video to stop using thousands of goats in medical training drills. “Each year, the U.S. military and its contractors shoot, stab, mutilate, burn, and kill more than 10,000 live animals in cruel and archaic trauma training exercises,” Stone said in the video, produced by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The video utilizes leaked footage of a Coast Guard trauma training drill, where live anesthetized goats had their limbs cut off and were stabbed to simulate injuries. The Associated Press reported in April that other branches of the military use similar training techniques on goats and pigs.

Roman, according to the report, confessed to an acquaintance that “he accidentally choked a kitten” a couple of weeks ago that belonged to roommates, according to the report. He also told the man “he bit the lips off one of the kittens and burnt its ear and whiskers with a lighter.”

Miss Le Pen’s eyes and forehead then appear for a second before a swastika and the eyes of Adolf Hitler are superimposed onto the FN leader. Furious, Miss Le Pen threatened to sue the singer if she kept the video unchanged when she performs in Paris on the July 14 national holiday and in Nice in August. “If she does that in France, we’ll be waiting for her,” she told Le Parisien. Hitting back at Madonna, she was quoted by the newspaper as asking: “By the way, has Madonna given back the children she stole from Africa? Or did she end up buying them?” Madonna adopted two children, David and Mercy in Malawi in 2007 and 2009, sparking a coalition of around 85 local NGOs to accuse her of “child kidnap”.

A man is on the run in Zimbabwe after allegedly making his own mother pregnant for the second time. Simon Matsvara and his mother Ethel Vhangare fled their home in Pote Village, Mashonaland Central province when members of their church group discovered she was expecting another child. Just four years ago the pair, whose ages are unknown, were fined by village elders after Mrs Vhangare suffered a miscarriage. Village chief Chinamhora said the community had been outraged by the claims and he has dispatched aids to hunt the mother and son down.

Cannibalism—whether unintentional, deliberate (as with the Donner Party, the Uruguayan rugby team, and scores of sailors in extremis) or plain murderous (the recent incident in Florida)—represents the most troubling extreme of our omnivorous condition. Just because we can, will we? According to Smithsonian Magazine, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans routinely consumed “preserved and fresh human remains” for medicinal purposes—tincture of Egyptian mummy, skull-and-chocolate for apoplexy, fresh blood harvested from public executions.

A crowd soon formed outside the building, eager to catch every 5,000-rouble ($160) bill Durov and his cohort were throwing. As tends to happen in these situations, the scene quickly devolved into an all-out brawl. “People turned into dogs as they were literally attacking the notes,” said one eyewitness. “They broke each other’s noses, climbed the traffic lights with their prey – just like monkeys. Shame on Durov!” For his part, the 27-year-old, whose net worth is valued at some $260 million, appeared to be enjoying the commotion, reportedly “laughing and filming” as people trampled over each other in desperation. He later claimed he was simply hoping to create “a festive atmosphere,” and stopped as soon as “people turned into animals.”

A British citizen has been arrested in Bangkok on suspicion of smuggling human infant corpses for use in black magic rituals after the bodies of six babies were found in a suitcase in a hotel room, Thai police have said. Chow Hok Kuen, 28, a British citizen born in Hong Kong of Taiwanese parents, was arrested in Bangkok’s Chinatown and was being held for possession of human remains, according to reports. The bodies belonged to babies aged between two and seven months, Wiwat Kumchumnan, sub-division chief of the police’s children and women protection unit, told Reuters, though other reports suggested they were aborted human foetuses rather than dead full-term babies. Photographs obtained by Reuters appeared to show corpses too small to have survived to term. Some of the remains had been covered in gold leaf, said police, apparently for use in black magic rituals.

Pirates took in an estimated $160 million in ransoms last year, and one study predicts the number will climb to $400 million by 2015, as the high seas thieves continue their brazen reign on the Indian Ocean. Efforts by shipping companies to beef up security, and by the European Union, which has mounted airstrikes on pirate ships, have so far been met with stepped-up attacks. Chillingly, pirates are now chopping off the limbs of captives in extreme cases when the airdrop of cash isn’t made quickly enough to suit them. “It’s an established, structured model, where you have Somalis who are leading and financing operations and then you have pirates who actually go out to sea and conduct the activity,” Brian Green, chief of the counter-piracy branch of the Office of Naval Intelligence, told FoxNews.com of the piracy industry. “They are, more or less, foot soldiers. They find targets of opportunity, attack them with the goal of hijacking and bringing that vessel back to Somalia.”

A professor who believed his young wife to be having an affair has reportedly cut off her lips in a fit of jealousy and eaten them. “He cut off her lips and ate them,” Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet quoted an unnamed source close to the case as saying. “He doesn’t seem to regret anything. He thinks she is the one who has offended him,” the source added.

Tartars in Bamiyan province prepare scorpions by smashing them between stones and letting them dry. The main part of the tail, with the sting, is then crushed into a powder and smoked with tobacco and/or hashish (marijuana).

The network touted the special as an investigation into crimes and a correlation between heavy metal music and Satanism, but the Washington Post’s Tom Shales had a different description, calling it “dirty-minded teleporn,” filled with “talk about butchered babies, dismembered corpses, cannibal cults and sex orgies.”

He noted the networks had cut their departments of standards and practices, attributing the whittling to “hyped competitiveness fostered by the Reagan administration’s sweeping deregulation” of broadcasting.

NBC began “Devil Worship” at 8 p.m. – the slot it reserved for “ALF,” “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties” on other nights – requiring frequent interruptions for disclaimers and parental advisories.

As Shales reported, Rivera himself addressed parents during the broadcast: “I am begging you. This subject is just too upsetting for your young children. Please, get them out of the room or change the station!”

NBC’s entertainment division produced “Devil Worship,” triggering much strife within the network.

In the days before broadcast, with negative publicity mounting, NBC was forced to sell some commercials at half price.

The Los Angeles Times reported KNBC’s “Devil Worship” broadcast carried just 14 commercials, including two for the National Enquirer and three for new horror movies.

An NBC spokeswoman told the Times the network’s switchboards received 331 complaints in New York and Burbank. (A secretary at the NBC affiliate in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, said it received just one call – from a viewer whose home lost power as the broadcast began and wanted a rerun.)

“Devil Worship” finished fifth in the weekly ratings, with viewers in almost 20 million homes. Only NBC’s “Cosby,” “Cheers” and “A Different World” and CBS’s “60 Minutes” ranked higher.

In his 1992 memoir “The Last Great Ride,” NBC entertainment chief Brandon Tartikoff recalled hiring Rivera after he scored big ratings opening Al Capone’s vault in a live syndicated special in 1986.

Another concession: “Devil Worship” was conceived as a “blunting weapon” to counter the second episode of ABC’s “Roseanne,” which ended up ranking eighth.

Although Tartikoff was apologetic in the days after the “Devil Worship” broadcast, he struck a somewhat defensive tone in his book, noting affiliates received calls and letters from viewers thanking NBC for “exposing this very real problem … infecting their communities.”

Still, Tartikoff wrote, “If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t.”